An international symposium is to be held from 19-20 April 2013 in Antwerp, Belgium, entitled Multilingual Videoconferencing in Legal Proceedings.

The symposium is being organised by the EU project AVIDICUS 2 (Assessment of Video-Mediated Interpreting in the Criminal Justice System, led by the Centre for Translation Studies, University of Surrey, 2011-13), and will provide an update on current practice and research.

The aims are to raise awareness of the potential uses and the limitations of multilingual videoconferencing in legal proceedings and to stimulate further discussion about:

how the combination of videoconferencing and interpreting affects the specific goals of legal communication,

how problems can be overcome or mitigated,

the role that system design, training and familiarisation can play in this process, and

the questions arising for a future research agenda.

The symposium will include the views of international organisations on videoconference-based interpreting as well as research conducted in relation to its use in national and cross-border proceedings and will introduce an enhanced set of guidelines for multilingual videoconferencing in legal proceedings.

Who should attend?

legal professionals (judges, lawyers, prosecutors, police officers)

public service providers

practising interpreters and interpreting service providers

representatives of interpreting service users

researchers in the field of legal interpreting including spoken-language and sign-language interpreting

specialists in the use of videoconference technology

videoconference system designers

representatives of educational and training institutions

Speakers:

Andrew Constable, International Criminal Court
Peter Engels and Hans Van de Wal, European Criminal Bar Association
Paul van den Hoven, University of Tilburg, The Netherlands
Viive Jõgevest, Estonian Police and Border Guard (tbc)
Maja Popovic, International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
Paul Pryce-Jones, European Forum of Sign Language Interpreters
Jago Russell, Fair Trials International
David Tait, University of Western Sydney, Australia (tbc)
Patrick Twidle, Court of Justice of the European Union
and
AVIDICUS 2 project partners

More information can be obtained from the symposium website (note for Safari users – you’ll need to use Firefox!).